Clean Spice Cupboard

If you're anything like me, you can go for years and not notice a glaring mistake in your house. One of mine was my spice cupboard. I rarely cook and haven't done so for at least 7 or 8 years so I have no idea why the cupboard was so darned full of spices which I didn't even know how to use.

Once in a while I'd get ambitious and make a big pot of soup or maybe go all out and make a slow cooker meal. At those times, I'd probably go into the spice cupboard and choose a few things that might work in the preparation of the meal. I'm not a good cook so my choices were usually just guesses as to what spices to use. I'd mentally make note of the cluttered shelf and sort of wonder exactly what I had in there but figured I'd look after it some time in the future. The future arrived this morning.

I'd made devilled eggs for a memorial service I'm going to this afternoon for Aunt Vida and went into the cupboard to look for paprika to sprinkle on the top of the eggs. Devilled eggs are my mainstay when taking food to a function because they're easy to make and I can't possible mess them up. I always had paprika before but there was none today. Scrounging through the spices, I came face to face with the fact that most of these spices were hard as rock or of questionable age. Time to clean them out!!

I pulled them all out and sorted them into some I could keep and almost all I could discard. The size of the "discard" pile was sort of embarrassing but I get pretty ruthless when I'm on a cleaning mission so they did, indeed, end up in the garbage.

Now the spice cupboard is kind of bare but neat. There's probably more in there than I need but I think it was a job well done.